Palmetto State News

Kathryn Moorehead has devoted more than two decades to assisting victims and helping them find a path forward in life.

Moorehead is the director of Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and human trafficking programs at the South Carolina Office of the Attorney General and the coordinator of the South Carolina Human Trafficking Task Force. She has been there for five years but has waged this battle for nearly a quarter-century.

“Since about 1997 I’ve been working with disadvantaged populations, initially with children and adolescents, and that extended, obviously, to their families and to adults,” Moorehead told Palmetto State News. “And it’s been sort of a progression in terms of the victimology that I saw. I first witnessed human trafficking serving in the Peace Corps overseas, both in Sri Lanka and Eastern Europe.”

She saw evidence of it far earlier.

“I was running some programs in Boston for kids aging out of foster care, and there were a number of kids who at the time, if we looked at the definition of trafficking, would have been trafficking victims,” Moorehead said.

Before she came to the South Carolina Office of the Attorney General, she worked in Cambodia and Guyana.

“I worked in Cambodia as a country director running their programs for international NGO [non-governmental organization]," she said. "We had five programs for female victims of both sex and labor trafficking. Prior to that, I was in Guyana, South America, consulting with the country’s only agency that worked on violence and human trafficking victims.”

Moorehead has worked with NGOs and governments in South America, Central America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. She was a research assistant at Harvard University and an integrated English educator in the U.S. Peace Corps in Sri Lanka and Poland.

“Once I wrapped up in Cambodia and returned to the U.S., I became aware of the position here of the Attorney General's Office to supervise and run the programs, as well as the state task force,” she said. “Under the legislative mandate, the attorney general is the chair of the task force, and he appoints me to run it. I came with a bit of a different skill set than my predecessor, who was a prosecutor and who did a lot of work in terms of training law enforcement and prosecutors. 

“However, I have experience in direct service and with victims and survivors [and] brought that to the table as well as my work over the years with different agencies in foreign countries as well as in the U.S,” she added.

Moorehead said the funding for her position and others in the attorney general’s office dedicated to this work comes from the office’s general budget.

“What we're ideally looking for is an annual allocation from the [South Carolina] General Assembly that would position us to be able to provide financial support to those who want to either create or expand programs across the state, including residential programs and also to provide, you know, prevention education,” she said. “We do have a new staff person who will focus heavily on the prevention component. Ideally, we want to prevent this from happening to individuals in South Carolina. But at the same time, we have to be realistic and be better prepared to respond to those who have already been victimized.”

Extensive study 

Moorehead, 51, is a Maine native. She earned her undergraduate degree in political science from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, received a master's of education in risk and prevention from Harvard's Graduate School of Education and did her post-graduate work at Boston University, where she earned a certificate in nonprofit management and leadership from BU's School of Management

While at Harvard, Moorehead researched, filmed and produced a documentary exploring the impact of community violence on adolescent girls in Boston. The university shows the film in a course focused on trauma, interventions and cross-cultural issues. 

Moorehead said efforts are underway to train law enforcement to better understand human trafficking.

“Absolutely. We’ve increased the opportunities for law enforcement to become trained,” she said. “The University of South Carolina Children’s Law Center is a member of the state task force, and through research that we helped them with, as well as a law enforcement work group, they developed a child sex trafficking training that was offered three times to law enforcement and will be offered online.

“We're encouraging law enforcement to dig a little deeper when they are investigating these cases and look at somebody who they may write off as a prostitute or something along those lines and look at them as potentially being a victim in this situation,” Moorehead said.

Part of the challenge is the nature of the activity, which is not always easy to spot. It’s easier to escape prosecution if the criminal is stopped with people in the car rather than drugs or guns, she said.

South Carolina officials also have targeted trafficking victims who work at illicit massage businesses and is partnering with North Carolina to try to assist and rescue these women.

“I think the last estimate I saw from South Carolina was around 145 of them,” Moorehead said. “That becomes very complex for law enforcement as well because, and I’m not saying that all illicit massage businesses involved Asian victims, but we do see these businesses that are victimizing those who speak Mandarin, Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese or Korean.

“And that presents, right from the get-go, challenges when you don't have law enforcement who can speak those languages, right?” she added. “Then you start thinking about the housing and how these victims are going to be able to communicate with those who want to provide them with services. It gets very, very complex and in many, many directions."

Lack of English skills is only part of the problem, Morehead noted.

“They don't oftentimes speak English and they don't have their documents,” she said. “They may have a photocopy. Their families back in their country, they're threatened. Or they don't understand, or they're told things about law enforcement here that they're going to be arrested. And they may compare law enforcement here with law enforcement in their countries, which is, especially in developing nations, a very different scenario, more military-like than what we see here.”

Moorehead said a unified effort is the best way to deal with this massive problem. 

“We were developing, through the task force, a more coordinated network in terms of point people in different regions, different sort of quadrants of the state and connecting them all with the law enforcement subcommittee at the state level,” she said.

Moorehead said labor trafficking is prevalent in South Carolina.

“We’ve been pushing to try to educate members of the state and regional task force as well as the communities across South Carolina and how to identify labor trafficking,” she said. “But it is a tad bit more complex in the way that it can present. But we are seeing in the numbers from the Department of Social Services, we’re seeing minor victims of labor trafficking, sex trafficking and labor trafficking. We’ve also seen recently a number of adults who’ve been labor trafficked in North Carolina.”

How citizens can help

People and organizations can provide invaluable assistance to law enforcement, Moorehead said.

“[The public can] encourage schools in their communities, churches and synagogues, to provide prevention education to young people, but also to bring awareness to adults and stakeholders and communities across the state,” she said.

Another problem is people perpetuating misinformation that they've discovered online. One false story that was spread online jammed the national human trafficking hotline with 1,000 needless calls a day, Moorehead said.

“What it did was prevent victims from being able to access services through the hotline,” she said. “And it prevented those who wanted to report cases or potential incidents. I would say education, and prevention education for young people as well as adults would be the primary way members of the community could really get engaged in this effort we’ve been fighting.”

Has human trafficking grown worse, or has it just become more visible?

“I think both,” Moorehead said. “I think that we're definitely more aware and states have honed their legislation and continue to do so given the complexities of the crime. But I also think that those who gravitate toward crime are becoming more aware of the fact that it's a high-profit, low-risk crime.”

Moorehead said more must be done to end this problem, which has grown worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. People who have lost their jobs, their homes or both are more vulnerable to traffickers.

According to the South Carolina Human Trafficking Task Force, in 2020, there were 139 cases of human trafficking reported and 179 victims discovered. There were 96 cases of sex trafficking, 22 cases of labor trafficking, nine cases of sex and labor trafficking together, and 12 unspecified trafficking cases.